In collaboration with Merrick Howarth and Bella Raja
Fighting climate change not only means setting ambitious targets, but matching those ambitions with the ground work. San Jose is a city on a mission — become carbon neutral by 2030. This catchy phrase means that the city will offset all emissions it produces. To do this adequately and accurately, the city must have a reliable way to measure emissions and understand the both the underlying factors that contribute to GHG emissions, and how best to develop plans that not only allocates political responsibility, but holds the right entities accountable. Ultimately, the transboundary nature of greenhouse gas emissions makes this an epidemiological challenge for the politically bounded world we live in. The report below attempts at a high level to define sustainability for downtown San Jose and share insights.
We examined emissions from two sources: vehicles and buildings, between 2013 and 2019. We chose this time frame due to availability of PG&E energy usage data. We also conducted these analyses at the ZIP code level, since PG&E data is collected at this scale. Our chosen ZIP codes were 95113 and 95112, which can be visualized below.
## Warning: sf layer has inconsistent datum (+proj=longlat +datum=NAD83 +no_defs).
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We used vehicle emissions as a proxy for the transportation sector as a whole, with the primary assumption being that the majority of trips are commutes to work. Using commute data from LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES), we were able to route commute trips originating from our chosen ZIP codes. The map below shows work trips that occured at least 261 times between 2013 and 2019.